Asus Matrix 5870 Graphics Card Review. Page 11

The majority of powerful graphics accelerators are exact replicas of the reference Nvidia and AMD products, but even here we can sometimes come across very interesting solutions that deserve a closer look. Our today’s article will talk about one graphics card like that.

Performance in Synthetic and Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

We minimize the CPU’s influence by using the Extreme profile (1920x1200, 4x FSAA and anisotropic filtering). We also publish the results of the individual tests across all resolutions.

The Radeon HD 5970 is unrivalled still, but the ASUS Matrix 5870 overclocked to 1 GHz outperforms the GeForce GTX 480. That’s an achievement considering how cheaper and simpler the RV870 is in comparison with the GF100.

In both tests the GeForce GTX 480 is brilliant at 1600x900 but the overclocked ASUS Matrix 5870 looks just as good or better at the higher resolutions. This shows again that the Nvidia Fermi architecture, even though very effective at processing geometrical information, often fails at high resolutions due to insufficient texture-mapping resources.

Final Fantasy XIV Official Benchmark

This benchmark produces an incomprehensible result in points, so we use Fraps to get more understandable numbers. It can only run at 1280x720 and 1920x1080.

The Radeon HD 5000 architecture has no rivals in this test as is confirmed by the results of the overclocked Matrix 5870 at 1920x1080. The GeForce GTX 480 makes the game just as comfortable to play, yet it is on Radeon HD 5800 series cards that Final Fantasy XIVruns best.

The results of the Radeon HD 5970 are due to the lack of appropriate software optimizations. We guess the developer will have corrected this problem by the official release of the game.

Unigine Heaven Benchmark

Things are different in this benchmark which was originally optimized for the Fermi architecture. The GeForce GTX 480 is the only solution to deliver a playable frame rate (if Unigine Heaven were a playable game rather than a benchmark) and the Radeon HD 5870 cannot do anything about that even when overclocked. The Radeon HD 5970 has problems with bottom speed in this test.